In My Silly Mind I've Gotten Married To You
by Naked Clown
Summary: Being in love with Oliver Queen isn't all it's cracked up to be, but sometimes you can't help yourself. Or five women who love Oliver Queen contemplate their sanity. Or an Oliver character study which isn't really about him all that much when you get right down to it.


**In My Silly Mind I've Gotten Married to You  
**

**Disclaimer: Not mine by any means, that's why it's posted here. The title is taken from Don't Forget by the awesome Martha Wainwright, some other song lyrics are referenced in each section, credits are at the end of the story.**

**Author's Note: So, full disclosure this may well be the only thing I write in this fandom, I have ideas, but they may or may not actually get published. Secondly, this did not come out as I intended but I think it still works in the context, sort of, mostly, though I'm still not sure what happened with the third section and the first bit is more sexy-times than I'm used to writing (apologies if it's really awkward). Thirdly, the song lyrics kind of inspired and influenced my thinking about each piece, but they're not really important to the stories per se (i.e. don't feel the need to search for them to listen to while you read). Finally, this is unbetaed, though it has been spellchecked, all mistakes are my own, but please try to keep criticism constructive.**

* * *

**Sara**

"_I love you, I love you, I love you like never before"_

As the Queen's Gambit leaves the dock she can see their whole future laid before them like a happy ending montage in a movie. Of course, even in her picture perfect ending Laurel doesn't forgive her for the longest time. She's ripping apart her family and she knows, _she knows_, that this is the most stupid, awful, selfish thing she has ever done in her life, but when he looks at her and tells her how wonderful she is and how much he loves her, she thinks that maybe (_please God, please, please, please_) it might just be worth it in the end.

He takes her below before they've even fully left port, takes her to the room they'll share, and they make love. It's burning passion and slow building flame, it's everything she ever hoped it could mean to be in love. He has her pressed against the door, the wall, the dresser, and the liquor cabinet before they're even nearly naked. He has hands in her hair and down her pants and she doesn't know how he's touching so much of her at once. Then she's half naked and he's on his knees, holding her against the wall with a hand on her belly. She's got a hand in his hair, pressing him closer, urging him on, her hips thrust against his face and then she comes with a shout and it's only his hand on her belly that keeps her upright.

He pulls her to the bed, and then they're both naked (clothes removed while she was more concerned with sensation than action) and he's sliding into her, his hands still seem to be everywhere at once and she's never felt more perfect or more loved. He holds her gaze and tells her he loves her, she rolls them so she's on top and looks down at him hips rocking in contrast to the vague motion of the boat (_I love you too, so, so much_). The look on his face that she gets in return has her seeing stars as she falls into her release. He rolls them to their sides, he doesn't pull out so she can feel him shrinking and ebbing away inside her, but for the moment he's still there.

"I'm so glad you came with me, Sara. I can't tell you how much this means to me." He kisses her, soft and warm and perfect.

She runs a hand over his chest feels her smile at the happiness he's offering fall somewhat. "Ollie, when we get back what's going to happen? You know, with Laurel. How are we going to make things right?"

His face is soft, and gentle as he replies. "We can't Sara, there is no making it right. There's only making it easy. I want to be with you, but we'll need to keep things low key at first, this is only going to hurt Laurel more if she sees it everywhere." He's making sense, but she's scared she'll end up facing it alone.

She places her head against his shoulder. "I know, I just wish we could find a deserted island and stay there forever, just you and me, living off the land, being with each other."

His smile is big and dopey. "Do you promise to wear a coconut bikini?"

"Only if you promise to suck out the splinters." She grins back.

"You drive a hard bargain, but I think I can manage that." He rolls her onto her back and then his mouth is on her chest licking and sucking with great care.

"I... I don't h-have any splinters yet, O-o-ollie." She gasps.

"It never hurts to be sure." He smirks, and then her whole world is just the warmth of his mouth and feel of his hands and his lips and him.

Later, she wakes up needing to pee, Oliver's sprawled on the bed snoring softly. He looks so peaceful, she wants to brush his hair away where it's falling over his eyes, but he wakes quickly if touched, she's already learned this. Besides watching people sleep is weird, he told her so last time he caught her, and she does need to pee.

The light in the bathroom is a harsh unforgiving fluorescent so unlike the softly lit bedroom, with its shades and its dimmer switches and its alcove lighting. She looks in the mirror as she's washing her hands, her hair is a tangle, her skin is covered in a sheen of dried sweat and she can see the beginnings of stubble rash on her chin. She does not look like a young woman flush with the joys of love, she looks dirty and tawdry, she looks like a slutty girl who just slept with her sister's boyfriend.

She stares at the girl in the mirror and wonders who she is and how she got here. She might love Oliver but is it really worth all the hurt, and the pain that she'll cause (_please don't let it all be in vain_). She closes her eyes and forces back the tears that are threatening to fall (_please let this risk be worth it_). She can hear him moving about, he's woken up and is searching for her, she opens her eyes and the girl who took a risk for love is back (one day they'll see that Oliver couldn't just stay with someone he didn't love, he had to follow his heart, they both did). She'll give Laurel time, she'll let her parents side against her if she has to, she has Oliver, she is in love (it feels wonderful, she's giddy with it, she's never felt this way, she never saw Laurel feel this way) everything else is secondary.

She can hear the intercom buzz from her position in the bathroom and she can hear Oliver quietly talking to someone over it. After she hears him hang up, she takes a moment breathing deeply and willing away any residual doubts before re-entering.

"What was that Ollie?" She asks with her smile as bright as she can make it, hoping it's not something that's going to have them turning back to Starling City, she wants one perfect memory before she has to head back and face her family.

"Just the Captain, we're heading for a storm, so things might get a bit rough. Don't worry though, we'll weather it, but if things get bad just hang on to me and I you'll be fine." He gives her a grin and holds out his hand in invitation.

"Promise?" She asks. He nods solemnly as she climbs into the bed beside him, and then he wraps himself around her, rolling them over and kissing her soundly. She doesn't need him to answer her further, she knows it's true, as much as he knows she wasn't just talking about the storm. Whatever happens, so long as she has him she can truly believe it'll all work out for the best.

* * *

**Helena**

"_And if you can't love me honey, go on, just pretend"_

When Michael died it felt like everything stopped, except her hatred for her father. That's how it stayed just emptiness and motions repeated through muscle memory, a living death with no future and no escape. Then she met him and it wasn't anything more than something, a touchstone, a point of contact for a world she'd already cut loose, but she thinks it's a start.

She hates her father, where once it was just disgust, there's now loathing and a seething, burning need to make him pay. Oliver shows her how to use it, how to make it count, how to hunt the men and women that are poisoning their city. He reminds her there are other sensations, he's the first man she's slept with since the bottom fell out of her world with the news of Michael's murder execution. She hopes it's the start of something new, but of course he is yet another person that lets her down.

After his dismissal of her she spends time muttering to herself like some sulking lunatic child (_"No, Helena, this is how you kill people. No, Helena, stop killing people, who told you that was okay?"_). She wants to scratch out his eyes and rip out his throat, she wants to lose herself in the feel of his body and remember something more than endless pain and hatred and death, something purer, something hopeful. But he throws that away for her too.

She can't find her father, because Oliver says, and she's really tired of Oliver dictating her life when he refuses to be anything more than an uninvited conscience, her very own Jiminy Cricket, if Jiminy cricket were a fucking hypocrite. She thought they were kindred spirits but, apparently if you get marooned on a desert island you're given free rein to judge others, while being free from such basic societal norms yourself. She thought that Oliver would help her, but he was more interested in whatever his own plans are.

She tries to gain or regain his trust, or at least his attention, but for some reason it doesn't work. She wants to destroy her father and gain Oliver, and she can't work out why he's resisting, the ex, Laurel, is currently in a relationship with his best friend and the cop he dates after her is barely enough to register interest for most people. The blonde is someone he protects and cares for, but it's not a form of love, she knows this, because he leaves her to her own devices, trusts in the idea that out of sight is out of mind. As if someone with Helena's focus would forget about any potential lead, as if he would stop tracking one of the names on _his_ list just because a route to it was sent out of the room.

She doesn't understand him, it should be so easy as far as she can tell. Step one: become a vigilante, step two: meet another vigilante, step three: start breeding the next generation of vigilantes. She sees it, she doesn't get why he can't. He and Laurel won't work, and he'd be with the blonde if the blonde was an option, but they make sense. She knows his secrets and he knows hers there are no surprises, they could be there for each other, they could be solace, why doesn't he see that.

But Oliver has more important things to do (like her father, like everyone) things which are more worthy than stopping her psychopathic father or at least making sure he can never live his life in the open air again. Oliver is a better person than her, because his father told him who to kill and she's just trying to kill hers (judge not lest ye be judged Oliver).

Every day she spends alone in her fight she slips further from the place in humanity that she should inhabit. That's why she tries to get Oliver back on side, tries to reconnect, and she knows she does it all wrong, even as she knows there's no other way for her to do it. She's losing everything she was holding on to, and now there's just Oliver and she can't lose him. He's her final connection to normal (and yes, she appreciates the irony of that) but they do say that in the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king. If she can connect with Oliver she can crawl back into who she's supposed to be by the proxy of his own connections. He is grounded most fully by the blonde and the bodyguard, then by Tommy, then his sister, his mother and Laurel. If she can get a foothold she can find herself again, the her that existed when Michael was alive, the Helena who wanted justice, not vengeance, the Helena who could tell the difference.

She does what she can to bring him back to her, but he is, apparently, immune to her advances. She sits in the motel room she is operating from, on the bed that has been used for god knows what, with guns and crossbows, all cleaned and cared for, spread out across the blankets till there's only the tiniest perch that will fit her. She thinks about Oliver, and about them, about his hollow gaze that she mistook for surrender and his haunted smile that she took for despair. She thinks about his fitful sleep patterns, and hyperawareness, she thinks about all the tiny things she never noticed herself noticing because she was so concerned with the immediacy of what he could teach her. She thinks about these things and she realises what's missing isn't due to some fault she possesses. Oliver has honed himself to become a weapon and that's all he is, she has a mission, a purpose, one she chose for herself and has fought to defend. Oliver has a book of names his father gave him, a need to dispense justice in the name of a dead man for no other reason than it was all he had to think about on his island.

The fact is, all she wants is something to hold on to, to keep her grounded, to pull her through. She knows he isn't capable of any real feelings for her, whether because of his feelings for Laurel, or because he's just no longer capable of normal human interaction, she wouldn't like to guess. But if he could mimic the appropriate behaviour, use her to help him play the playboy, maybe, just maybe she could find her way back to morality by herself. Of one thing she's certain though she won't find it by following the gospel according to Oliver, not when the first commandment is _"Thou shalt not kill, but I can"_.

* * *

**McKenna**

"_Will you remember me boy, remember me loving you?"_

She'd slept with Oliver before the island, some night when he and Laurel were on the outs, or that's what he was telling people. It had been fun, but she'd known even then that he was Laurel's. Five years and one miraculous rescue later and he's still Laurel's but Laurel's not his.

McKenna has always had a crush on Oliver Queen, it was like a rite of passage at their high school. with puberty came your first period, your first date, your first kiss, and the first time you doodled Mrs Oliver Queen on your trapper keeper. But McKenna isn't that girl anymore, she likes Oliver well enough but she doesn't imagine that their future is anything other than floating away from each other when they start to get bored.

She knows because just like before there's another girl in his periphery, she doesn't think he's realised himself though. He can't see the way he changes around her, hell, right now he can't see anything past Laurel, but one day he'll turn around and get bowled over by the girl he suddenly sees. Once upon a time McKenna had actually thought that girl might be her.

Despite her carefully cultivated walls preventing her from getting too invested, recently she's started to, on occasion, let her mind fall into the rabbit hole of Oliver Queen and all the myriad ways her life could be different. Then one afternoon she heads to the soon to be opened Verdant and all of her daydreams disappear with the shake of a cocktail.

She enters through the open loading bay and sees them clustered at the bar. Oliver is on the customer side leaning over the counter and Tommy is hovering around the cash register (she knows where it is because she and Laurel spent three hours watching them argue about placement the night before). At first she thinks they're alone, but then there's a flash of fuchsia and a blonde girl's with them, fiddling with the register and talking a mile a minute.

"Okay, so give me five minutes and I'll have this rerouted. Then Ernie here is gonna make me a strawberry daiquiri while you, Bert, order the pizza."

"Hey" both boys shout together.

"World-weary foil" she jerks her head at Oliver "Naive troublemaker" she nods at Tommy.

"I am not naive, or has no-one told you the story about the goat?"

"We don't talk about the goat, Tommy." Oliver says distractedly, too busy playing with his phone, more than six months back and he's still confused by apps, she thinks with a soft smile.

"What happened with the goat?" The blonde asks "Actually, I don't care, I just want the cocktail and the pizza I was offered to make sure you two don't go bust."

McKenna clears her throat.

"Hey, McKenna, what are you doing here?" Says Tommy, suddenly trying, and (obviously) failing, to appear innocent while (not at all) subtly shifting to stand in the way of the blonde.

"I've come to see Oliver."

"Well you've seen him, bye!"

"Tommy." The blonde pokes out from behind him, one hand on his arm, and a somewhat pitying look on her face. "I'm not doing anything illegal, you don't have to worry."

"Oh." Tommy deflates before their eyes and Oliver makes a huffing noise his face light and bright and his eyes shining.

"Don't worry, we can hang outside the Seven-Eleven and buy beer for high schoolers later." Oliver says with a smile.

"That's the lamest illegal activity ever." Says the blonde, pressing something on the screen of a tablet connected to the register.

"Fine, we'll buy beer for middle schoolers." He pauses before adding. "Whether they want it or not. What do you say Tommy, shall we get some 11 year olds lit?"

"That sounds far more illegal than you're aiming for." A series of beeps rings through the empty club, followed by what McKenna assumes is the register rebooting. "All done. Daiquiri me."

"Fine. But you need to get to the other side of this bar, I need room to work." Tommy says getting ready to be centre of attention.

"Oh, is this gonna be just like Cocktail. Thing 1, take off your jacket, Thing 2, queue up Addicted to Love." She says grabbing her tablet and running around the bar.

Oliver pulls his phone out and starts messing about with it, obviously struggling to fulfil the request, he glances over his shoulder. "McKenna, have you really only come here to see me?" She wonders at what point she was supposed to interject.

"Sorry," She says, despite being anything but. "I guess I got distracted. Aren't you going to join this display?" McKenna asks as she walks over and kisses his cheek.

"Ugh, no, he's _so_ Doug Coughlin." Says the blonde as she finds the ideal spot to watch from and sets up a bar stool.

"That's uncalled for Felicity." Oliver complains pulling McKenna to his side, while simultaneously pouting and looking for the requested song.

"But true." Felicity responds. "Wouldn't you say so?"

"Yeah, and at least you're not Tom Cruise in this scenario." Moans Tommy before she can comment, having obliged the request to remove his jacket.

"'80's Cruise, Ice Man, when he was still passing for a sane person and it was generally agreed he was smokin'." Says Felicity.

Tommy's eyes go wide. "I'm Ice Man?"

"Of course, who else would you be?" Felicity says it as if it's the most obvious thing in the world and starts eating pretzels from the bowl on the bar (that are out for what reason?). But Tommy looks touched, and Oliver's face is soft and wondering, and McKenna knows there's more to it, she can't quite put her finger on it but it's somewhere in her brain. And then...

"Goose." McKenna blurts, and they all turn like she'd slipped their minds for a moment (a moment when Oliver has his arm around her shoulders). "In high school, the guys, they called him Goose, Ollie was Maverick, he was Goose." She's feeling _really_ uncomfortable now.

"Well, kids at your school were dumb." Felicity says decisively. "They're clearly on the same level, it's just Oliver's ego practically has a gravitational pull."

McKenna swears she hears Oliver growl at that. Tommy meanwhile is happy as a clam on Prozac.

"Okay, Felicity prepare to have your mind blown." He takes a moment to remove his tie and unbutton three buttons on his shirt. "Hit it Frick."

"You got it Frack." Says Oliver, complete with fingerguns.

The beat pounds and Tommy gyrates his way through mixing daiquiris, and seriously, the boy needs to quit hip thrusts for the rest of his life just to make it even out. Oliver slides down the sound every now and then allowing Felicity and McKenna to sing "Addicted to Love" at an unreasonable volume.

After, Oliver orders the pizza and they mix more drinks. McKenna and Oliver end up having a dance off with Felicity and Tommy which involves body rolls, the running man and Tommy lying on his back with his legs in the air while Felicity spins him around. It's a great night, and it ends with Oliver in her bed and keeping her up for the best of reasons, and she thinks she'll remember it fondly for years. But the next morning, when she's nursing a hangover and Oliver's already gone, she wonders, when they look back, when they recall it fondly, will they even remember that she was there?

* * *

**Laurel**

"_Whatever words I say, I will always love you"_

Laurel loves Oliver, except for when Laurel hates Oliver. Wash, rinse, repeat. So went their relationship before the island. After the island things changed, a course of events that was not unexpected by any means, Laurel hates Oliver, except for when Laurel loves Oliver. Wash, rinse, repeat.

His return is quite simply the hardest thing she has ever had to deal with, because it's so much more complicated than the already complicated situation in which she found herself (_"My name's Laurel and I'm in love with a jerk." "Hi, Laurel"_). She finds herself wondering idly when exactly her life became a soap opera, a thought which didn't cross her mind when her boyfriend was lost at sea while taking her sister on a cruise nor when she began to have semi-regular sex with his best friend who she not so affectionately calls a douchecanoe, often while he's going down on her (which he really excels at, for what it's worth).

She wants to yell at Oliver and she wants to hug him, she wants to hit him and cry with relief that he's back. She wants to feel one single emotion, anger, joy, despair, relief, anything as long as that's all she feels. Instead she feels 987 different things every second before cycling back and feeling them all over again. She could handle being happy he's back or hating him for surviving where Sara didn't; what she hates is feeling both at the same time, it's as bad as the past five years and their blur of grief and anger and despair and the endless, boundless feeling of betrayal.

She's sick and tired of everything connected to Oliver being hard, of it being a struggle. She wishes, more than anything, that he'd had the nerve to just break her heart when she started taking about living together. At least that way things would have been simpler, she'd have been able to scream at him and shout at him without the awkward fact that whatever he did to her wasn't bad enough to warrant whatever caused him to bear scars on 20% of his body. She wishes she lived in a world where _"I hate you and I wish you were dead"_ didn't silently carry the word still in penultimate position. That she lived in a world where it wasn't something she'd actually lived through. She doesn't know how to deal with Oliver being back from the dead. She's not Thea, so lost and alone that she sees Oliver as salvation and normalcy; she's not Moira or Walter, happy he's back but glad that they didn't have to deal with Robert returning to find they've moved on; and she's certainly not Tommy, so happy his best friend is back he ignores the flashing signs indicating that things could be really seriously wrong with him.

She can see he's changed, even in those early days when he's trying to prove that he still fits into the world he left behind. But he doesn't, Tommy barely fits into that world anymore, he doesn't drink as much, and he doesn't do drugs, he barely sleeps with that many women who aren't her, but he stays because he's Tommy and being alone with other people is better than being alone all by yourself. But Oliver's back and he's not alone anymore, or at least he's alone with Oliver for company, and she thinks that might be why Tommy can't see all the changes in his friend, their lives always consist of being there for each other rather than talking. But she's never had such a simple, or maybe that should be complex, relationship with Oliver, they were all about talking and fighting and... well. But they can't be that anymore, she's lost all the tools she used to interact with him, but she can't quite lose him too.

Her life is a limbo and it's awful, and no, it's not worse than Oliver's adventure, on The Mysterious Island Inhabited By Torturers, but the pain is hers, and she won't let it be diminished because Oliver will win Crappiest Holiday Ever until the end of time. Not everyone can get tortured for real, some people have to make do with a reasonably unreasonable amount of pain in their lives. She refuses to stop being angry with him just because he's back from the dead when she was angry with him when he actually was dead, and she's spent five years too angry with Sara to do anything more healthy than cry her way through a bottle of wine and call Tommy for some 'company'.

She feels like every new revelation is little more than a way to make her stop hating him. Like his end game is to make her come back to him and start the entire raging shitstorm of their relationship all over again. She doesn't want that, she never wanted to fall in love with a billionaire playboy, she just wanted Ollie, with his easy charm and (mostly) good heart. Now what she has is the Ollie she loved playing the entitled jackass because he thinks it's what everyone expects. Like they're all expecting him to be unchanged by five years on an island (alone or not as the case may be, who knows what's true and what just sounds like it is anymore).

Laurel chooses Tommy, and then Tommy chooses Oliver, on Laurel's behalf though he claims no such thing, and then she chooses Oliver and Oliver chooses something else. It's the same stupid cycle over and over again and she's tired. Then Tommy's gone and she's still tired and Oliver's further away than ever and there's just no respite. She loves Tommy and hates herself, and she loves Oliver and hates Oliver, and Oliver loves her and Tommy but apparently can't face anyone except that blonde girl, Diggle and Thea, when Thea even lets him get near her.

She loves him, she will never stop, he's her first love and her first heartbreak, but she can't be _in love_ with him, not anymore. She can't want something she no longer believes he knows how to provide. She wants (more than anything, more than anything in the world) to find a place where they can still be something. But they can't be lovers, not anymore not if she wants to keep him in her life. The thing is, in spite of everything, she can't imagine her life without him, even with the five years of practice she's just had. So she closes herself off to him as a lover, and concentrates on having him as a friend in the hope that one day (when he's ready, _if_ he's ready) he can turn to her for the support he so obviously needs and that she wants so desperately to offer.

* * *

**Felicity**

"_I love you in the morning, when you're still strung out"_

It starts when he smiles at her in spite of everything she's just said, when he walks into her office and wants to know if she missed him, when she amuses him, when he comes to her for help, when he trusts her because she trusts him (despite there being very little reason for her to do so). It starts, in the same way she assumes it starts for everyone who falls in love with Oliver Queen, his easy manners, his sweet smiles, and his way of making her feel so very, very, special.

Then she learns the truth, and she still loves him (in the way that a crush can be termed love) but she _knows_ him too. Knows the constant threat he represents, the barely contained darkness, the need for vengeance over all else. She learns the truth and she learns to be scared, but she still loves him, still likes being around him and making him smile; and the thing is the more she learns the more she wants to make him smile, the more she sees he needs it.

Just because she sees the darker parts of him it doesn't mean she stops thinking and dreaming, she still imagines being pulled and pushed by strong arms, held firmly but gently. Yearns for big hands and solid muscle, and turns down Tim from Accounting and the guy she meets at the coffee place on 8th because she knows that she'd just be thinking of him and the exquisite way his stubble would scratch her skin. So she stays as she is, with no-one in her life, and thinks of him when her hands slide under the covers.

She gets to know his easy attitude to intimidation, his nonchalance towards murdering people and his general inability to react in anything remotely approaching a reasonable human way and she doesn't run in the opposite direction screaming _"sociopath"_ she just loves him more. She watches him with women, and mostly he's fine, he flirts and smiles and makes his way through whatever social interaction he needs to just like always. But sometimes, _sometimes_, she catches him looking at a woman and he just doesn't seem to know how to process his attraction, like being attracted to anyone but Laurel is so far outside the realms of his understanding he doesn't know what to do about it. He looks at her that way once, and she hasn't slid her hand under the covers since. When she tries all she can see is this lost, damaged man who can't relate to the world he finds himself in and even a fantasy feels like a betrayal of him.

She still loves him though, she can't stop it, can't help it, can't leave it. So she goes on a date with Tim from Accounting, and Steve from the comic book store, and the brother of one of Carly's friends. She pretends she doesn't notice the odd looks he gets on his face, or the fact that her phone gets traced while she's out with them, or the shadow she's sure she sees at the edge of her window when she gets home after. She pretends not to notice and focuses on making him see reason; calling him out for each kill, ensuring more and more that the shots he takes disable his target so they can be delivered to the police rather than the morgue.

She slips into his real (non-vigilante) life incrementally, it takes time and careful planning, she's not John, she can't be explained so simply. It occurs to her how strange it is when he introduces her as his friend, because when he does he gets this look on his face that seems to say _"see how normal I am? I've made a friend."_ She doesn't know what to make of it, but apparently she is evidence that Oliver's well adjusted. Her, the girl who knows him because of the time she's spent helping him target the rich and infamous. She wonders sometimes if she really _is_ doing the right thing or if she just tells herself that because admitting she'd do anything for Oliver is too scary a thought to consider. It's no less true for not being vocalised, no less important for being ignored, and no less worrying for not being confronted.

She fears him, worries that one day she'll say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing and he'll lash out on instinct and then she'll just be dead, or injured, or forever disavowed of the belief that he's anything approaching a force that she and John can control. She's scared of the fact that he doesn't talk about the island; she thinks she knows why, and she supposes she understands, but the fact of the matter is that he's got PTSD. She knows it, he knows it, John knows it, everyone knows it (it's one of the reasons why they excuse his oddities) but no-one really considers the reality of what it means. He's a time bomb, any moment he could go off and if he doesn't talk about it the chances of it happening are much higher, and the likelihood of them stopping it in its tracks is too low, because if he doesn't talk about it how can they possibly consider what might trigger it?

She's scared of him, more scared than she has ever been of anything, and that's why she loves him. She trusts him unquestioningly, and loves him unconditionally, and hopes, beyond hope, beyond hope, beyond hope, that he'll see that and trust her back. If he does, maybe he'll confide what happened, release the pressure on his soul and let some of the pain and disorientation go and instead make a place for himself where it's safe. Where he can be scared and fragile and broken and beaten, but never, ever be judged. It's his strength that worries her (it worries John too, but he doesn't know how to deal with it any better than she does) she wants him to bend before he breaks, needs him to yield before he leaves them all with a trail of death and destruction they have no hope of ever putting right. Needs him to give before he ends up in a place there's no coming back from, before he's as dead as everyone thought he was this time last year.

So she closes her ears to reason and her eyes to his worst transgressions and loves him more every day (forever and always 'til death do us part). She hopes in her heart that it'll be enough to guide him back to where he needs to be, she doesn't care as much as people might think what will happen when he gets there. He can tell her, or John, or Thea, or Laurel, hell he can tell Oprah for all she cares, but she knows he needs to tell someone. He's living in a house of cards, she can see it so clearly and wonders why no-one else can. So she loves him fiercely and fully and trusts that it will be enough to bring him through, trusts that in the midst of the static in his head he'll find his way, trusts that knowing he's loved by someone, anyone, just as he is right here, right now with no expectation or pressure to be who he was, will be enough to help him become the hero that she knows that he can be and the man that she that knows he is.

* * *

**Author's Note 2: Song lyrics quoted in each section are as follows:**

**Sara – Songbird – Fleetwood Mac/ Stevie Nicks**

**Helena – Bad Boyfriend – Garbage**

**McKenna – Groovejet (If This Ain't Love) – Spiller Feat. Sophie Ellis Bextor**

**Laurel – Love Song – The Cure**

**Felicity – Sunday – Bloc Party**

**Additionally Laurel's thoughts on Tommy were originally expressed by Cordelia on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Any other references in the story were unintended.**


End file.
